Company hopes to cover 120 million people with LTE by end of next year, 250 million by 2013

Yesterday in an interview with UBS, Sprint CFO Joe Euteneuer announced the company's plans to launch LTE phones in the second half of 2012. Sprint's first multimodal base station, which supports both CDMA and LTE, is currently being deployed.

According to Euteneuer, the plan is to build out Sprint's LTE infrastructure across the U.S. first, and then introduce handsets that can take advantage of it.

Euteneuer pointed to Q3 of next year as a likely timeframe for Sprint's first LTE handsets, which he says "will be very competitive to what's already out on the marketplace."

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer